Backing up my photos - part N+1
Jun. 3rd, 2009 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyWell, guess what? I'm back to rsync.
MS SyncToy 2.0 just irritated me with taking literally hours to start up in some situations. SyncToy 1.4 is fast but the control they use to determine which directories to include doesn't flow down to subdirectories - if you have a directory which contained hundreds of subdirectories, you can't just uncheck the parent, you have to drill down and uncheck each of them. Furthermore, if subdirectories get added for future runs, it will include them unless you remember to drill all over and find them and uncheck them.
Also, BOTH SyncToys had problems with doing the same mirror to two physically different drives with the same drive letter. I plug in one drive at a time and mirror to them. After syncing to one T:, then putting in a different T:, it assumed they were the same and refused to do anything, since it figured they were already sync'ed, even if the new T: was totally blank. If I added a new file on the source, it would copy it to the destination and that would be the only file there. I had to add a separate but identical job and would have had to keep them straight for which drive they were for.
I tried Toucan, which looked promising, but as far as I can tell, it isn't smart enough to ignore the read-only flag on destination files, even though there's a checkbox for "ignore read-only".
There are a bunch of other choices, but none both free and good, and honestly, $30 for a sync program? Really rsync does absolutely everything and does it perfectly, I just wanted a nice interface. But I'll take "works, and I know exactly what it's doing, and I can make it do anything I want" any time.
It's still a little kludgy under Windows, but I've decided it's a small price to pay for having software that I *trust* and I know it's doing the right thing.
Bottom line: rsync *works*, correctly, reliably, predictably.
MS SyncToy 2.0 just irritated me with taking literally hours to start up in some situations. SyncToy 1.4 is fast but the control they use to determine which directories to include doesn't flow down to subdirectories - if you have a directory which contained hundreds of subdirectories, you can't just uncheck the parent, you have to drill down and uncheck each of them. Furthermore, if subdirectories get added for future runs, it will include them unless you remember to drill all over and find them and uncheck them.
Also, BOTH SyncToys had problems with doing the same mirror to two physically different drives with the same drive letter. I plug in one drive at a time and mirror to them. After syncing to one T:, then putting in a different T:, it assumed they were the same and refused to do anything, since it figured they were already sync'ed, even if the new T: was totally blank. If I added a new file on the source, it would copy it to the destination and that would be the only file there. I had to add a separate but identical job and would have had to keep them straight for which drive they were for.
I tried Toucan, which looked promising, but as far as I can tell, it isn't smart enough to ignore the read-only flag on destination files, even though there's a checkbox for "ignore read-only".
There are a bunch of other choices, but none both free and good, and honestly, $30 for a sync program? Really rsync does absolutely everything and does it perfectly, I just wanted a nice interface. But I'll take "works, and I know exactly what it's doing, and I can make it do anything I want" any time.
It's still a little kludgy under Windows, but I've decided it's a small price to pay for having software that I *trust* and I know it's doing the right thing.
Bottom line: rsync *works*, correctly, reliably, predictably.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-04 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-04 09:59 pm (UTC)The only problem is that you have to abide by cygwin oddities - you refer to the C: drive as /cygdrive/c/ - and I don't think it deals with spaces in filenames properly, at least I couldn't find a way to make it. It doesn't do backslashed spaces, and if you quote it with a wildcard, as in:
rsync -av --delete "/cygdrive/d/My Documents/*" "/cygdrive/t/media_backup/My Documents/"
then the wildcard doesn't expand, and you get:
/cygdrive/d/My Documents/*: file not found
So I changed it to My_Documents. Other options are to alias the directory for the purposes of running this command (with subst, or a mount point).
no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 07:08 pm (UTC)Those are microsoft tools but they may not be as capable as rsync.
Their main advantage is preserving Windows file permissions. (Which may be of no benefit to you.)